From waithood to alternative futures: unaccompanied children and young people’s temporalities of care in the UK’s migration regime

Accounts of children and young people who have come to the UK without parents through precarious migration routes have aptly demonstrated that their futures are held hostage by restrictive border regimes. They show that prolonged periods of uncertain waiting for regularised status, combined with anti-migrant sentiments and policies, can produce a sense of enforced presentism. However, heeding recent warnings not to collapse migrants into suspended presents or futureless lives, I draw on the Children Caring on the Move research project to complicate the categories of waithood, child/youth migrant, and their relation the UK’s hostile environment by attending to unaccompanied young people’s fragile practices of care for and about others, both local and transnational. Doing so, I argue, provides insights into waiting and its afterlives, not least that waiting is not the absence of time but is filled with multiple temporalities. Doing so also reorients conceptualisations of young people’s ‘future’ towards the uneven possibilities and practices for imagining and constructing alternative ‘futures’, including those which keep non-national orientations and caring practices alive in the face of assumptions that integration into a national (neoliberal) order is the route to a stable, or indeed desirable, future.